Prague,or critical theory in the 21st century

The taxi driver finally got to the freeway to Atatürk Airport, after a traffic jam had made us worry about missing the return flight from Istanbul, on 28 May 2016. Simultaneously, also the conversation that in the back seat David Rasmussen and I were having about the Prague Conference ‘Philosophy and Social Science’, to be convened for the 25th time, accelerated. The idea had come up, at first only tentatively, of celebrating the anniversary with a special issue of PSC that would collect memories, reflections, anecdotes, testimonies from a large number of the protagonists as well as gather the existent record of the conference. A quarter century is a significant span of time for inviting reflections on the nature of an institution that has lasted that long.

Things often grow out of an admixture of contingency and human determination not easy to decipher. Prague initially grew out of Dubrovnik, which grew out of Korčula.

The narrative begins over a half century ago. Between 1963 and 1975 a summer school used to take place on the island of Korčula, animated by the Praxis philosophers from Belgrade and Zagreb, and enriched by the participation at various times of Marcuse, Fromm, Goldmann, Mandel, Bloch, Habermas, Bottomore, Heller, Kosik, Kolakowski, Birnbaum and many others, who would discuss among other things humanism and power, progress, history, reification, revolution, utopia, anarchism, equality and freedom. When pressure from the central Yugoslav authorities against this forum for critical dialogue mounted beyond the already difficult level the Praxis academics endured for over a decade, an alternative venue was sought and found.

The torch passed then to the Interuniversity Centre of Post-Graduate Studies (IUC), meanwhile newly established in Dubrovnik. In 1976 Habermas and Gajo Petrović started organizing and directing the new Dubrovnik-based ‘course’, ‘Philosophy and Social Science’, the direct forerunner of the Prague conference, which lasted – under the co-directorship over time of Richard Bernstein, Claus Offe, Andrew Arato, Albrecht Wellmer, and, as of 1989, Jean Cohen, Axel Honneth, Ivan Vejvoda – until 1991. Among the participants in that course were, among others, Charles Taylor, Steven Lukes, Richard Rorty, Anthony Giddens, Alain Touraine, Cornelius Castoriadis. On 12 April 1991, we all bade farewell to one another planning to meet up again the next year at a course which never materialized in the form we expected. Contingency crept in once again in the most disruptive and tragic way: the war that eventually brought former Yugoslavia to an end broke out in the summer. It soon became clear that unless some other location and venue were rapidly figured out, that would be the end of that small but tenacious and passionate tradition.

As Axel Honneth recalls, some senior figures urged thinking twice before transplanting yet one more time a fortunate mode of ‘interlocution across divides’ which had perhaps already given its best in the transient contexts of the acme (Korčula) and the tail-end (Dubrovnik) of the cold war. The directors then in charge, all recently appointed and young (Cohen, Honneth, Vejvoda and myself) decided not to let go of ‘the course’ without at least trying to find another venue. I was the most junior and it sort of naturally became my task to look around for viable solutions. In 1992 the conference, as the course began to be referred to after the dissolving of the framework of the IUC, took place in Ischia, an island off the Neapolitan coast in Italy. That experience made for continuity – a break in the yearly sequence might have probably led to termination of the conversation – yet somehow lacked the appropriate atmosphere conducive to the crossing of divides between worlds. Thus the same year, during the fall, pursuing a clue offered by one of the participants, I asked Josef Zumr, the director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, if his institution would consider hosting our conference. He and his successor, Milan Mraz, warmly welcomed us and since May 1993 the conference ‘Philosophy and Social Science’ has had a new home, for a quarter century now. Determination had not been deterred by adverse contingencies and had benefited from positive ones.

Continuity and difference have coexisted during these 25 years. Like in Korčula and Dubrovnik, also in the rooms of Villa Lanna in Prague what holds this circle of people together for a short lapse of time every year and keeps many of them coming again and again at their own expense is a fervid interest that itself sinks its roots in a deeper ethos of intellectual life on which more will be said in closing.

Differently than its Dubrovnik predecessor and more like the Korčula summer school, the Prague conference has no overarching institutional framework within which it fits as an integral part, but only a host institution – the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences – to which directors and participants owe their grateful acknowledgement. Without the Institute’s decision, made sometime between 15 October and 2 November 1992, and without the dedication of some of its members, notably Marek Hrubec, co-director since 2000, the conference ‘Philosophy and Social Science’ would have had a much lesser chance to survive dispersion in the aftermath of the Balkan wars.

Differently than the originary Korčula meetings, instigated by the humanist Marxist philosophers of the Praxis group and more like its immediate Dubrovnik predecessor, the Prague conference does not revolve around Marxism, but more broadly around critical theory and its ongoing reinterpretation in the age of neo-liberal globalization, after 1989. Indeed, in at least two senses the conference has become part and parcel of what an external observer could describe as the historical development of critical theory at the turn of the century and beyond.

Two renowned international journals constitute the kind of natural loci where members of this group often publish their work and to which the interested public would look for new trends in critical theory: Philosophy & Social Criticism, founded by David Rasmussen at the time when the Dubrovnik experience started, and Constellations, the journal started under the initial editorship of Andrew Arato and Seyla Benhabib at the same time Prague started and as a successor to the journal Praxis International, the international version of a periodical of the Yugoslav dissident philosophers from whom the Korčula and Dubrovnik experiences sprang.

Furthermore, while the first generation of critical theorists, the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer and Adorno and others, took no notice of the burgeoning Korčula-based debates, with the notable exceptions of Marcuse and Fromm; and while Jürgen Habermas, the lone star of the second generation, participated in the Korčula seminars and co-founded the Dubrovnik course (though he has never attended the Prague conference thus far); most of the representative figures of the third generation of critical theorists have been involved as directors or participants in the Prague conference. Their students of the fourth generation of critical theory, and in some cases students of their students (a rapidly expanding fifth generation), now understand Prague as the natural scene where to seek the feedback of peers. This community of critical theorists has been shaped by the profound impact of Habermas’ work, which has opened up critical theory to becoming a multi-disciplinary endeavor. Now philosophers, political and social theorists, constitutional and legal scholars, historians, students of religion and the axial age, of psychoanalysis, contribute to a multi-centered tradition no longer exclusively based in Frankfurt but including offshoots in many universities not just of Germany and the USA, but of northern and southern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, China and South Africa.

The reflections of this momentous transformation manifest themselves in the thematic richness of the conference, in the openness of dialogue not just across disciplines but also across paradigms. In Prague not just the critical theorists close to the Habermasian inspiration can be found, but also those who incline towards Rawlsian political liberalism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, recognition theory, Foucaldian post-structuralism, neo-transcendental justificationism, post-secular sensibilities. The transformative process undergone by critical theory also manifests itself in the themes discussed at the conference, which have included reference to: identity and difference; reflexivity and reflection in law, morality and institutions; constitutionalism and democracy; evil and its representations; cosmopolis vs. empire; the nature of the human; religions and politics; reclaiming aesthetics; global justice and globalization; post-secular society; multiple democracies; the politics of nature; eco-challenges; democratic, non-democratic and post-democratic authoritarianism; progress in history; political authority; risk and catastrophe; and many other subjects that can be gathered from the overview of the Prague conference published as the final section of this special issue. Several of the participants’ testimonies collected in the second section address this peculiar quality of openness of the Prague conference. The unity underneath this noticeable diversity cannot therefore be traced to an orthodoxy or a dominant paradigm, and in closing an hypothesis will be offered as to its rootedness in a peculiar ethos.

The Prague conference – which has now been regularly taking place for longer than either of its single predecessors and soon will equal the duration of the two combined – has also undergone a significant quantitative growth over the years. While attendance oscillated between 40 and 70 in the 1993–2006 period, later it has increased to about 85 to 130 among papers, contributions to workshops and plenaries in the 2007–16 period. Between the inaugural conference, in May 1993, and the latest one of May 2016, a total number of 1,724 presentations have been offered, 191 of which were plenaries addressed to the whole group, 1,373 were papers presented in parallel sessions and the remaining number were contributions to special panels, workshops and roundtables often put together by self-organized groups of participants. It would have been impossible to offer a space to all these participants, but the contributions collected below amount to a representative cross-section of this extended group. They include all but one of the present and past directors of the Prague conference, and then a fair number of participants from 16 different countries who are reflective of the third, the fourth and in a few cases the fifth generation of critical theory. Some of these participants are senior, others are junior faculty, some have attended Dubrovnik, Ischia and Prague in its early years, others have joined the conference in recent years, as can be gathered from the documentary section at the end of the issue.

The distinctiveness of the Prague conference relative to the preceding experiences is also indicated by the modification of its leadership: the number of directors over time has grown to 8, coming now not only from Germany and the USA, as it used to be the case in Dubrovnik, but also from Italy, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Mexico. Furthermore, a certain number of regular participants has with increasing frequency started to take responsibility for planning and running roundtables and workshops. This is perhaps the most interesting consequence of quantitative growth: the structure of the conference tends to differentiate itself and produce an original form of aggregation of subgroups of participants who are temporarily interested in conducting debates on various new topics or, more recently, to discuss each other’s published work. This format has also been helpful for addressing topics of political relevance such as the Iraq War and its aftermath, the EU enlargement, social movements in the Czech Republic and in the world, the future of the public university, or the Czech situation.

Some of the contributions collected in this special issue draw attention also to other aspects of the Prague conference over and beyond multi-disciplinarity and paradigmatic pluralism. ‘Prague’ is a social world of its own. As one would easily expect of critical theorists, the social structure and the human setting where critical exchanges take place do not escape close scrutiny. Again, a plurality of voices can be heard. Prague comes off, from some of the entries, as ‘a safe place to speak from the margins’ and a place that invites ‘experimenting with unorthodoxies’ (Fine), one where ‘the geopolitics of critical theory is best represented and where it is being reshaped’ (Testa), a place that offers a stage, and a chance of being heard, to many who come from the academic peripheries of the global world, from those circles whose voice usually becomes audible, if ever, only if it limits itself to address (better if in intellectually picturesque ways) thematic interstices neglected by the credentialed global centers.

In the eyes of others, instead, the metaphor that best captures the conference is that of a 21st- century ‘salon’, with directors as hosts and participants as guests: in this picture ‘formal democratic procedures that determine the appointment of directors or the relationship of directors to participants’ are conspicuous by their absence (Moss). The climate of discussion is portrayed by another contributor as ‘always open-ended and unpredictable’ yet charged with the ambivalent quality of being at once ‘polite and frank’, ‘fascinating and scary’ (Sørensen). As in most human groups, first impressions count a lot, ‘your first time is your best chance to make an impact; when novelty fades, expectations stabilize, roles freeze, and social advancement becomes less likely’ (Sørensen), to which a director adds: ‘Sure, there are a lot of little power struggles going on in the background, and of course, many subtle and not so subtle games of distinction are played – most notably when it comes to the question of who joins whom for lunch or who takes whom to dinner’ (Rosa). Yet, as in all humanly ambivalent relations, Prague is also about the very opposite, namely about ‘the genuine desire to do away with distinctions, to overcome the spirit of competition and to treat everyone the same’ (Rosa).

We do not have the privilege of knowing how the Korčula or the Dubrovnik participants felt when reflecting on the human texture of their important intellectual experiences, but certainly one of the purposes of this special issue, beyond celebrating an achievement in which all of us can take pride, is also to document – through the direct testimony of a large segment of the Prague regulars – the wealth of relations, reciprocal influences, solidarities, affinities, shared propensities that extend their impact well beyond those 1,724 papers presented, and the much more numerous questions and answers exchanged, over a 25-years period, in the rooms of Villa Lanna.

What the 57 contributions gathered here document bears some significance also for those who are not internal to the tradition of critical theory or not even just sympathetic to it. They offer a glimpse of the internal life, as experienced by insiders, of one of those global intellectual communities or networks whereto the spirit of the Humboldtian university has migrated and resettled in the 21st century. Let me conclude by clarifying the meaning of this claim.

If we look at the history of the university, two aspects are worth pausing on: its peculiar pattern of development and its underlying ethos. Ever since its founding the university has always developed not by functional differentiation or in response to internal tensions originating in structural conflict, but by structural accretion, i.e. by adding or juxtaposing new organizational layers onto the pre-existent ones. ¹ In the beginning was ‘the faculty’ and the degree par excellence was the ‘baccalaureate’ or ‘bachelor’, the fundamental curriculum being the one leading to that degree. The doctoral degree was conferred for the first time in Paris around the year 1200 and in America at Yale in the 1860s.

From that later point on, the unending fortunes of a new structure began: the single-discipline department, inspired by the ideal of research and teaching cross-fertilizing one another. While in the USA the department soon overshadowed the older ‘faculties’ – renamed ‘schools’ or ‘colleges’ but hollowed of all vitality – in Continental and especially southern Europe the two structures co-existed symbiotically for much longer. Furthermore, in the USA, thanks to the philanthropic action of great private foundations (Rockefeller, Russell Sage, Carnegie Mellon) and also to the direct involvement of federal research agencies, a new institutional segment begins to proliferate in many universities, alongside traditional ‘schools’ and newer ‘departments’: the research center, sometimes hyper-specialized and sometimes interdisciplinary. Now the scientific activity of departments is enriched by an ongoing dialogue with their own research centers or the university-based ones, and these research centers sometimes have more public visibility than the original departments. During the last few decades, new structures have been juxtaposed to these. Research activities commissioned by external third parties, often business organizations, sponsored research teams, spin-off ventures under faculty leadership, international programs or branches of the home university, summer schools, cultural activities and segments reaching out to the general public (museums, theaters, public lecture series, collegiate sport activities), university presses, alumni associations, internal self-monitoring and research-quality-evaluating agencies, press offices, and branches of distance learning – initially meant to reach out to mature, already employed students seeking a degree, but much underestimated in their role as Trojan horses, introducing the notion of ‘knowledge for profit’ and soon morphing into low-quality institutions, designed for profit, which are to the academic idea of the liberal arts college as toxic subprime mortgages are to legitimate loans. ²

Concerning the second aspect, it must be noted that the values undergirding the university as an institution have traditionally drawn on an ethos not unrelated to the sacred and religion. For long theology was a central subject in the curriculum. Many medieval universities originated from the ‘cathedra’ established within the ‘cathedral’ in order to stimulate theological reflection and to educate the clergy. Paris owed its early fame to its theological schools, already operative in the Notre Dame Cathedral. This originary connection with religious institutions – monasteries and churches – has infused quasi-sacred overtones within the ethos underlying the university. The academic orders, through their dedication to the idea of serving truth above anything else, have created standards of excellence shielded from the competition of other values and encouraged generations of scholars to understand their research work as a vocation that one is called to – Wissenschaft als Beruf, the life of the mind as a profession.

Of course, since the early 19th century the modern university has severed its links with the churches and religion. However, buried in its deep-seated values there survives a sense of being in contact with meanings somehow ‘ultimate’, with codes of conduct deeply ascetic, which lead us to stigmatize the ‘selling-out’ or profanation of the ‘vocation of the scholar’ with mercantile concerns or compromises with power. Remember the approving tone of Adorno’s quoting Bacon’s point that disinterested knowledge pursued by true scholars and free from the influence of wealth and power commands a special unconquerable sovereignty? Within disinterested knowledge ‘many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and discoverers cannot sail where they grow’. ³ These codes of scholarly conduct urge on us a kind of conduct infused with love for truth above any other consideration, with affection for our mentors as well as mentors’ generative concern for their students: an anti-materialist ethos that cannot be infringed without eliciting profound blame. Who among us, even if possessed of the needed affluence, would dare be seen driving a Ferrari or flying a private plane? How would he or she be perceived by peers and public? The code of the sacred, driven out of the university by the secular split from religious institutions, lingers on in the semantics of ‘betrayal’ often associated with the falling short, on the part of academics, of these ethical guidelines.

So it has been up until the affirmation of the neo-liberal university of the past 30 years, which has twisted the mission of the university in the direction of a commercialization of its products, of a struggle for survival within the ubiquitous competition for resource optimization, of submitting to the standard of producing the same output with less expenditure, to the idea of operating like a firm in a world of competing enterprises. Some way-stations of this transition have been: the standardization of the learning workload through the credit system, the increasing replacement of tenure-track faculty with instructors on temporary contracts, the presence of professional managers at the helm of university governance, the concomitant downscaling of the influence of academic senates relative to that of boards staffed with non-academic administrators, standardized evaluation of the quality of research outputs geared to the competitive ranking of universities, the reorientation of research strategies to the optimization of rankings, pressure towards profitability in all university-related activities.

The lived experience of this transformation emerges in the humorous or bitter narratives exchanged at lunchtime during international conferences. Wherever our academic affiliation lies, the university as a bureaucratic machine – the ‘normal’ university – is a toilsome tangle of deadlines, forms to be filled in, obligations, applications, evaluations, meetings taking place sometimes in an atmosphere of distrustfulness. In some places this lived experience is accompanied by a feeling of insecurity linked with the fact that tenure fails to protect from the wholesale shutdown of entire departments, but in all other places it is connected with a perception of disempowerment and helplessness.

Against this backdrop, my previous claim about the non-parochial significance of the contributions collected here perhaps acquires clearer contours. The spirit of the Humboldtian university, centered on seeking the truth together and educating others to join in the search, is far from dead. That spirit just has migrated from the bureaucratic structures of the neo-liberal university to those networks of scholars who, like in the Middle Ages, wander from location to location, from conference to conference, know one another and follow each other up, seek recognition by peers and not visibility, cross-fertilize their work through one another’s feedback, listen to one another with that disinterested interest that has always been at the center of the ethos of those who dedicate their life to ‘science as a vocation’.

Whereas the institutions called universities now tend to be places more and more plagued by countless chores, thoughts and minds are fertilized by exchanges that take place in research communities or networks of interlocution like the group of critical theorists who have been meeting yearly in Prague now for 25 times. May those meetings and exchanges last for many more years.